The Organisational Culture Maintenance and Transformation Programme

This Programme has been developed by the Director of IGO Dr Lionel Stapley over a twenty-five year period which has included a Thesis for an MSc in OD and Doctoral research followed by application as part of organisational consultancy projects and further post-PhD research. Much of the PhD Research was first published in Dr Stapley's first book The Personality of the Organisation: A Psychodynamic Explanation of Culture and Change, Free Associations, 1996.

The Programme is largely based on an application of psychoanalytic understanding regarding the way in which culture develops. This approach sees culture as something that an organisation is, or that members of the organisation are the culture. This leads to the notion that while it is not possible to change or transform culture per se, if you know how it develops you can transform those elements of the organisation that will result in a transformation of the culture.

The Programme can be applied to organisational culture transformation; and organisational colure maintenance. In regard to the latter, it may be the case that an organisation has a positive culture, but it's not clear why. In such cases, the research will reveal the reasons why which will help the CEO and board to constantly replicate and maintain the positive culture. When the findings reveal a negative culture, the research will reveal the cause of this negativity and propose a transformation programme.

In all projects the consultants will only work with the CEO and Board, this may differ from the approach of others who propose and carry out multiple workshops/seminars with all staff. A time consuming and lengthy, hugely expensive process; and with very limited success in regard to transformation of the organisational culture.

The IGO approach has shown that a two-year Programme can achieve a successful transformation to a positive culture at reasonable fees. Furthermore, because of the process of working in a way that encourages the CEO and the Board to achieve the transformation by their actions, the culture will be sustainable. This again is contrary to findings that big percentages of culture change fail; and are not sustained.